10 Cents

Banque de l'Indo-Chine issued fractional centimes notes like this one to address a chronic small-change shortage across French Indochina — a problem that had plagued the colony for decades and worsened sharply after World War One disrupted metal supplies. The 10 centimes denomination was essentially emergency fiduciary paper filling the gap left by absent bronze coinage.

Imprimerie Chaix was primarily a commercial and poster printer, best known for its Belle Époque railway and travel lithography. Gustave Fraipont worked extensively in that same advertising tradition, which makes this a genuinely unusual pairing of commercial illustrators with colonial currency production rather than a specialist security printing house.